What can discourse psychology say about teachers' music talk and their teaching strategies?

Abstract

The teaching in music and culture schools is an activity that involves approximately one third of the children in Sweden, but there are only a few scientific studies conducted on the subject. The most of its participants will have music as a hobby in their future lives, but the vast majority of the students in higher music education once started their carriers in those schools. In this way music and culture schools can be seen as having a great impact on both cultural and musical activities in Sweden. This also points at the importance of knowledge concerning this institution, which this paper hopefully supplies for. The study has a social constructionist and post-structuralistic approach where both discursive psychology and discourse theory are used in the analysis of the data. The empirical material consists of group conversations with teachers in the music and culture school. The results are presented as two discourses. In The Teacher Tradition the teachers are passing on a tradition to the pupils. Here is a tendency to describe music as high and low. In The Pupil Preference the music taste of the pupils is regarded as essential and the task of teachers is to support their pupils. Here a relativistic approach to music is found where the pupils music taste determine the content of the teaching. The discourse psychological approach used in this study contribute to a relativistic and praxical understanding of teachers strategies, knowledge and identity constructions.